Food Over Medicine (5 page)

GM:
I have a friend who told me that he eats meat for protein to build muscle. I pointed out that elephants manage to grow pretty strong on a diet of plants. This gave him pause. He pondered for a long while and then said, “Yeah, but I don’t want to get fat.”

Muscle builders will generally eat a high-protein diet. They’ll have egg whites and fortified protein foods because they believe it helps them bulk up. Are they right about that, that it helps them develop muscle?

PP:
Well, if protein built muscle, if you could build muscle in the kitchen, we’d live in a land full of Arnold Schwarzeneggers. The issue with bodybuilders is something I call error of attribution. In other words, bodybuilders need more food and more calories, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they need more protein. However, when they start doing aggressive bodybuilding and athletic activities, their coaches and advisors tell them to increase their protein intake; they do and they feel better as a result. But what they’re really doing is adding the extra calories that they need to their diets; they would feel equally well if they ate a diet like the one that you and I eat.

GM:
So their muscles could get just as big on our diet?

PP:
Yes, because the way muscles get big is resistance training, which is somewhat limited to gender and genetic predisposition. There is nothing that most men can do to look like an NFL linebacker. They’ll just never have that body type, no matter how much they exercise, no matter how much they eat. We do have genetic limitations, but it is possible for somebody with the right genes to become just as big or strong by eating a plant-centered diet. (Interested parties can check out
www.veganbodybuilding.com
.)

Athletes may be the key to turning popular opinion around because what they do is high profile and they’re always looking for an edge. There are some pretty high-profile athletes who have converted to a plant-based diet and their performances improved. The triathlete Dave Scott was vegan when he won six Ironman Triathlons in the 1980s. Carl Lewis was vegan when he was setting track records, and he attributes his success to the vegan diet. And then there’s Tony Gonzalez, one of the older players in the NFL, who adopted a plant-based diet.

GM:
There are more and more vegan athletes all the time. NFL running backs Arian Foster and Montell Owens, boxer Timothy Bradley, former NBA basketball players John Salley and Salim Stoudamire, tennis champion Venus Williams, ultimate fighters Mac Danzig and Jake Shields, and “the world’s toughest woman,” Juliana Sproles, winner of the “Tough Mudder” competition.

PP:
Tough Mudder bills itself as the toughest obstacle course on the planet, and it’s now clear, for any who may have had doubts, that you can win it without ingesting any animal protein.

GM:
Okay, so an increase in animal protein doesn’t result in an increase in the size of your muscles or in improved athletic performance. What are the differences between animal protein and plant protein?

PP:
Well,
The China Study
shows that the cancer-promoting effect was limited to animal protein. We didn’t see this effect when it came to plant protein, but that doesn’t mean that high amounts of plant protein don’t become problematic. That’s why people need to consume a high-carbohydrate, low-protein, low-fat diet.

GM:
So we have an upper limit of 15 percent of calories from fat, and an upper limit of 10 percent from protein. By my math, I’d say we’re talking a lower limit of 75 percent from carbohydrate?

PP:
Yes, from whole, unprocessed foods. Legumes, vegetables (including the starchy vegetables), fruit, and whole grains. Fiber-rich foods are the basis of the diet. Not the carbohydrates found in processed foods, fruit juices, and sugar. The label “carb” gets applied in common usage to both unhealthy processed foods and healthy whole grain foods and vegetables; that’s why it’s important to focus on eating whole plant foods and forget about the useless label “carbs.”

GM:
Let’s get more specific about your dietary plan. What do you advise that people eat for their three meals a day?

PP:
Well, first of all, I don’t advise eating just three meals a day. We have them eat four or five or even six meals a day. I want them to do that for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don’t want people getting ravenous because it leads to overeating. If you eat breakfast at 6:30 in the morning and don’t eat lunch until 12:30, you’re likely to be so ravenous by the time you sit down for lunch that you’re going to overeat. While it’s not that you want to eat when you’re not hungry, you want to eat when you’re beginning to get mildly hungry; for most people, that’s every three or four hours or so. The second thing is that when your blood sugar levels get low enough, if you really wait until you’re out of fuel, you won’t feel or think well. I like to get up in the morning and operate with high-speed cognitive ability and energy all day long; that’s really hard to do when your system’s completely empty. So we like four, five, six meals a day, with smaller amounts of food at each meal than one would consume on a three-meal-per-day plan.

And we like to offer people specific suggestions for what to eat for breakfast. Oatmeal is always good and it’s really simple. Oatmeal and raisins, for example, and a sliced banana. Or I make a fruit smoothie in the morning that has vegetable powders, almond milk, a banana, frozen berries, some flaxseeds, food-grade green tea, and brewer’s yeast. You might wonder what’s up with brewer’s yeast and vegetable powders. I’m all about maximizing my intake of superfoods—chopping up kale and adding it to soup, using romaine lettuce to make wraps instead of tortillas, for example. So I had Wellness Forum Foods develop a smoothie mix with simple ingredients—dehydrated vegetable powders in the morning is a good thing—brewer’s yeast because it is such a concentrated source of several vitamins and minerals; food-grade green tea, which is a powerful source of antioxidants; and flax seeds. Mix in a blender with almond milk, a banana, and some frozen fruit, and you have a nice twenty-ounce drink with fourteen grams of fiber. It tastes kind of like a milkshake with frozen fruit in it. I look forward to it every morning.

I know people who like rice and vegetables for breakfast, so I tell them to go for it. You don’t have to wait until noon or six o’clock to have rice and vegetables. If you want a baked potato for breakfast, that’s fine. We have some strange biases in this country about which foods can be eaten at which times of the day. On a typical day for me, I start with my smoothie and then I’ll have some cereal midmorning. Today I had broccoli casserole and salad for lunch. If I get hungry midafternoon, I’ll have some leftover broccoli casserole. For dinner, I’ll have a great big salad and baked potatoes or rice and vegetables. My sweet tooth sets in during the evening, so I’m most likely to eat fruit for a snack.

That’s the basic plan. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I still love to go out once in a while and eat elegant food, but once your taste buds get down-regulated, you find that you’re perfectly satisfied with simple fare. It’s not that you don’t focus on flavor—the food I eat is really delicious—but I’m happy with baked sweet potatoes and a salad. Steamed vegetables and rice and a salad. Baked potatoes and black bean soup. A lot of simple fare that’s really, really good.

GM:
Let’s list the grains that could be the basis of a diet.

PP:
Rice, quinoa, wheat, corn, barley, buckwheat, any of them.

GM:
Now, wheat is something people generally eat in the form of bread, pasta, and couscous—

PP:
Right, but wheat berries are also swell. I wish I ate more of them, actually, because they’re really good. They’re very filling and people generally like them; they’re kind of chewy and have a great texture.

GM:
You make it like you make rice. You just boil wheat berries?

PP:
Yes, and that’s an important point. People generally know what to do with rice, but they’re less familiar with other grains. People say, “I know how to cook rice, but what do I do with barley or quinoa?” And the answer is, substitute it. You know how to make rice and vegetables, rice and beans, you know how to put a cup of rice in soup—do the same thing with barley, quinoa, buckwheat, wheat berries, any grain. Boil it just as you would boil rice and use it the same way in the meal. That gets people experimenting with different grains. And it’s the simple substitution for rice that gets them to step outside their usual eating pattern a little bit. Later they take it a step further; there’s an abundance of cooking classes and healthy-eating cookbooks using plant-based food. You just have to get to the place where you understand what it is you want to learn how to do. It isn’t eating chicken and fish instead of beef; it’s eating plants instead of animals. And once you get that distinction in your mind and understand that by “plants” we don’t mean tofu hot dogs and fruit juice–sweetened cookies, you’re on your way. We’re talking about whole, unprocessed plant foods. It’s then easy to source out information with that distinction made.

GM:
Speaking of tofu, for people who are used to having chicken or fish or meat—high-protein deceased animals—as a centerpiece of their meals, how do you feel about replacing animal protein with tofu, tempeh, seitan, or some other high-protein plant food?

PP:
They’re fine. Over time we want to be getting closer to the beans, rice, corn, potatoes, steamed vegetables, raw vegetables, and fruit diet, rather than so much high-protein meat substitutes. It’s also important to differentiate between minimally processed meat substitutes, like tofu and tempeh, versus the tofu hot dogs, fake pepperoni, and other highly processed meat substitutes that are really just vegan-friendly junk food. These junk foods are okay while you’re first transitioning to a plant-based diet, or when you’re going to a holiday picnic, but they should not be part of the daily fare.

GM:
Is giving up the traditional meat, chicken, or fish the hardest part for folks?

PP:
Well, sometimes they give it up for something even more deadly. At the wedding I talked about earlier, while I was eating a plate of broccoli, everybody else ate veggie lasagna. Now, veggie lasagna, you think, “Hey, that sounds pretty healthy, right? That’s got to be better for you than meat.” This veggie lasagna had four kinds of cheese in it and was topped with a cream sauce. And really there isn’t any red meat they could’ve served at this place that would be more deadly than the veggie lasagna that they served as the centerpiece of the meal.

GM:
Four kinds of cheese and cream? That’s not really a whole lot better than deep-fried butter on a stick.

PP:
Exactly. At best we’re talking only a difference of degree between what health-conscious, sophisticated people at an urban wedding are eating and the crap that we think only unsophisticated rubes would eat. So the centerpiece of the meal can be something that appears to be healthy and often isn’t. I’ve been at people’s houses when they’ve said, “Oh, we know you’re a vegetarian, so we made a vegetarian meal for you.” And they serve pasta and vegetables. I figure, okay, that’s not bad, how can you mess that up, right? Well, if I take pasta and vegetables and douse it in olive oil, I’ve just consumed enough fat for the week in one meal. So even people trying to accommodate me on a vegan plan mess it up, despite the best of intentions.

GM:
Would you say that, in addition to a surfeit of unhealthy ingredients, like dairy products and meats and oil and sugar, Americans suffer from a lack of nutrients that they need?

PP:
Yes, and that happens in a couple of different ways, actually. For example, people take in gargantuan amounts of salt on the standard American diet and virtually no potassium. And it’s not just the excess salt that’s the problem; the lack of potassium is a problem, too. So they adapt a plant-based diet, potassium levels go up, salt consumption goes down, and the body is much healthier. People overconsume some nutrients and underconsume others. A lot of people in this country are overfed, but are still malnourished. Also, people who eat the standard American diet generally have pretty messed-up gastrointestinal tracts due to constipation and inflammation. That makes it difficult for them to absorb the nutrients that they’re taking in. So the nutrient deficiencies happen two ways: what they’re putting (or not putting, actually) in their mouths and how much of it actually gets into the system.

GM:
Let’s talk about inflammation. Inflammation can be systemic, is that right? If your body gets inflamed, it’s throughout the tissues of the body?

PP:
Yes. You could have localized inflammation. You have surgery and the site of the incision becomes inflamed; there are some things you can do about that, and we all understand that. Inflammation can also be generalized, which we can measure with something called a CRP test, for C-reactive protein. It doesn’t tell you where the inflammation is, but the most likely place is the lining of the blood vessels, the endothelial cells that produce nitric oxide and keep the blood vessels open. That’s usually where the inflammation resides, which is why CRP is considered a pretty good marker for a risk of coronary artery disease.

GM:
What’s causing this inflammation?

PP:
Animal foods contain something called arachidonic acid. In small amounts, it’s really not so bad for you. However when you consume a lot of it, it’s a precursor to something called series-2 prostaglandins, which are inflammatory. Again, it’s good to produce some series-2 prostaglandins; too much, though, and you get some inflammation. So that’s one way some inflammation happens.